Mobile is over. Meaning that its growth is over. Ben Evans on mobile as a saturated mature market, globally. Related: Voice may be smaller than its proponents think. It seems to lack a compelling use case.

And globalisation is over too. Princeton economist Michael O’Sullivan argues in a new book that we’re heading for a split between “Leveller” countries that still believe in rights and freedoms, and more authoritarian “Leviathan” countries. The 17th century language is deliberate. The Economist has an interview and an extract.

The world is heading towards a food shortage. The Oxford Martin Institutes’s Michael Hamm proposes eight solutions.

When energy industries stall, they crash quickly. This is a bit technical, but the Gregor Letter notes: “after nothing happening for a long time, everything appears to be happening at once.” The consequences for the oil industry could be “devastating”.

Consumers know when they’re being nudged. Of course they know there’s more than “two rooms left”. Interesting article on consumer user research.

Voltaire was right. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Just get it done.

140 years of recorded sound. Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason presents a radio history. Conclusion: content always beats technology (50 mins). There are another seven programmes about specific instruments. There may only be a few days to listen.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Sixes or sevens will be away for a couple of weeks. Back on 3rd August.

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 “The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” (Thornton Wilder)

Data released to mark “World Day Against The Death Penalty”, last Thursday, shows that 94 countries have abolished the death penalty in law (Albania, Rwanda, and the Cook Islands have joined the list during 2008) while another forty no longer execute offenders although they retain the right to do so.

Worldwide there were around 1,250 executions, of which almost nine-tenths took place in five countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States. China leads on this grisly league table, while there are 7,500 people on death row in Pakistan.

Most of the related trends suggest that the world is moving, slowly, away from judicial murder. In Europe only one state, Belarus, still retains the death penalty (abolition is a condition of EU membership). According to Amnesty, in central Asia a number of countries have restricted use of the death penalty: Kyrgyzstan has abolished the death penalty for ordinary crimes, Kazakhstan has had a moratorium on executions since 2003, and Tajikistan has had moratoriums on executions and death sentences since 2004. In Africa, the high court in Malawi has declared the mandatory death penalty unconstitutional while Burundi, Gabon and Mali are taking steps towards abolition.

And even in the Unites States, the number of executions fell to 53 in 2006, from a peak in the 1990s; it is the only country in the Americas to use the death penalty. Japan, meanwhile, seems to be running against trend, with an apparent increase in judicial execution.

China’s inequality is well documented – its gini coefficient is well above the level at which it would start to cause concern, and rather higher than that of the United States. Income levels also differ sharply by region, with wealth being skewed to the coastal areas. This week’s report of a clash in a border region distant from Beijing is only the latest in a series of clashes with the authorities, helpfully recorded by Open Democracy. Some disputes are over land – others just take the form of violent confrontation with the authorities

In a recent article in OD by Paul Rogers suggests that the violence is the production of frustration at “the disabling effects” of growing inequality. As he writes:

Three incidents in July 2008 alone indicate the pattern:

* a huge demonstration and riot in Guzhou province, southwest China. As many as 30,000 people mobilised in response to claims that police had covered up the alleged rape and murder of a teenage girl; cars and government buildings were set on fire (see Li Datong, “The Weng’an model: China’s fix-it governance“, 30 July 2008)

* a three-day demonstration by hundreds of migrant workers in Zhejiang province, eastern China. The protest began on 10 July after the arrest of one of their number by police

* an attack on a police station and local administrative offices on 17 July by more than a hundred people near Huizhou, Guangdong province. This was sparked by rumours that a motorcyclist had been beaten to death by the police. In the confrontation, one person was killed and ten injured.

These are just a handful of many thousands of examples of violent social unrest in China each year. The great majority is directed against police and government officials, and only a few of them are reported in the media outside the country.

Li Datong, who writes regularly for Open Democracy on China, notes that the Chinese media uses the phrase ‘mass incident’ for incidents which have to be quelled using the police. How many such incidents in a year? Almost impossible to verify, because of Chinese restrictions on reporting such incidents, but estimates say it could be as high as 80,000, an astonishing figure, even given China’s size. (If Britain had a comparable level of incidents per head of population, we would have around 5,000 incidents a year, or a hundred a week.)

Li Datong notes the extent to which rapid economic growth has been built on the state’s monopoly of violence, but reports a recent occasion where the governor of a province ended up apologising to the people after a large scale riot in Weng’an. In a sense, this is a story about the limits of state power. He argues that the authoritarin model can’t persist, for three reasons:

First, citizens have more access to information and freedom in circulating it than ever before. The fact that so many members of the public knew that the authorities’ version of events in Weng’an was untrue or deficient, and were able to post their own stories and experiences, means that the total monopoly of information that was a bulwark of state power no longer holds (see Geoffrey A Fowler & Juliet Ye, “Chinese Bloggers Score a Victory Against the Government“, Wall Street Journal, 5 July 2008).

Second, the Weng’an riot is revealing in that none of the rioters were themselves affected by the incident which sparked their protest. After all, the death of a girl in suspicious circumstances directly affects at most a few families. At a deeper level, however, an environment where public anger and frustration have been bottled up for a long time can lead to any available incident becoming the occasion for an eruption of mass fury. The commentator Xu Zhiyong, who said that “Weng’an could be any county in China”, was right.

Third, local governments often act with wanton disregard for the law and public opinion. In the past the central government has chosen to tolerate this situation in order to maintain a united front. This has meant that the actions of some local officials have come to reflect on the government as a whole. The inevitable result – evident in Weng’an in the disparity between initial and eventual official reactions – is a crisis of governance.

Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke summarise in a short article Power and Plenty, a book they published last year. Their underlying argument is that globalisation is a political phenomenon, not a technological one. The significance of this is that once learned, technology is not unlearned – but political changes can be reversed, and often are.

The standard theory of international trade tells us that while trade may raise incomes generally, it produces both winners and losers. If the losers are sufficiently politically powerful, they may convince governments to impose protection. More importantly, history tells us that this is not just a theoretical curiosum, since this is exactly what happened in late 19th century Europe. … Faced with an invasion of cheap grain from Russia and the New World, governments in France, Germany and other Continental countries caved in to the protectionist demands of their agrarian constituencies, raising agricultural tariffs significantly.

Geopolitics mattered as much as national politics. The transport technologies of the 19th century would not have had the impact they had were it not for the role of the Royal Navy, effectively policing the world’s oceans. But this fell apart after World War I; the recent wave of globalisation, they argue, required the US to take on this role. The authors also point to earlier examples, such as the ‘Pax Mongolica’ of the 13th and 14th centuries.

The present cycle of globalisation has similarities with that of the 19th. Regions with ‘different factor endowments’ (land, labour, capital) are being drawn into ever closer contact. The equivalent of those 19th century French farmers are the unskilled workers of the OECD.

There is a more fundamental issue here, though. I’ve blogged before that the re-emergence of China and India represents a return to a 500-year old global trade patterns. In geopolitical terms, this brings risks:

The international system has historically done a pretty poor job of accommodating newcomers to the Great Power club. German unification and industrialisation during the late 19th century led to tensions with Britain and France over colonial and armament policy, while Japan’s rise to regional prominence during the interwar period, and its search for secure sources of raw materials, ended in war against United States and its allies. Both precedents are worrying, in that similar questions are posed today, both in terms of the rights of emerging nations to rival the established powers’ military capabilities (notably with regard to nuclear weapons), and in terms of the strategic importance to countries like China of ready access to oil supplies and other natural resources.

Their final observation is that interdependence and trade do not guarantee peace. “Interdependence implies vulnerability, and vulnerability can lead to fear, with unpredictable consequences”. The economist and politician Norman Angell suggested in The Great Illusion that war was unthinkable because there was no economic or political advantage to be gained from it – in 1910.

Other relevant posts:
Globalisation and the power of the executive

What’s the difference between a dialect and language? Answer, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

But reading the article – on Scotland and the politics of Trident – made me realise there was a more serious point to be captured.

The deployment of Trident at the long-established nuclear base at Faslane is opposed by the SNP and the Greens (and a majority of Scots, not to mention quite a lot of other people elsewhere in the UK). The article’s worth looking at if you have even a passing interest in the politics of Trident, but one thought struck me while reading it.

The Scottish government doesn’t have the powers to prevent the deployment of Trident – “defence policy” is reserved for Westminster – but it does have control over planning, the environment, and transport. There may also be a claim under international law. (These options are reviewed at the end of an article in The Scotsman). It’s looking at these as a way to stop the development.

My thought was: when politics fails, campaigners reach for regulation instead, and these may be effective tools. We’ve seen something similar this week in the conviction of the Metropolitan Police in the de Menezes case, but on health and safety grounds.

But the fact that they have to do this still tells us something about the failure of the processes of political engagement to resolve public differences (as seen from the enthusiasm – possibly short-sighted – with which members of the Scottish Labour Party have attacked the SNP’s stance on Trident.) In turn this speaks to long-standing problems of falling turnout and declining membership of political parties (there was a good review of the scale of this issue across Europe in an article in New Left Review last year by Peter Mair (issue 42, subscription required).

At the same time, the fact that the regulatory processes do exist at local and regional level creates new opportunities for engagement, which has the positive effect of re-invigorating politics, but not necessarily to the benefit of the existing political parties.

In the article, Ian Jack updated the old linguists’ joke for the 21st century:

Question, when is a nation not a nation state? Answer, when it can’t say no to nuclear missiles in its back garden.

In short, the 300+ scientists who contributed suggested that the condition of land, sea, air and rivers have all deteriorated in the last 20 years, to a point where economies are likely to be threatened (or to put it another way, the free ride of the markets on the biospehere is about to hit its limits). Some quick headlines:

• We have 15.7 hectares per person but are using 21.9 – broadly confirming the calculations of others – such as the Global Footprint Network – that we are more than 30% above the carrying capacity of the planet
• Climate change is now ‘drastic and unequivocal’, and drastic steps are needed to curtail it: “Fundamental changes in social and economic structures, including lifestyle changes, are crucial if rapid progress is to be achieved”.
• Irrigation is reducing the quantity and quality of water flows for food, while fertilisers are causing contamination. Desertification is destroying soil quality. The scientists put their hopes in GM food.
• Fresh water shortages will become critical: by 2025 1.8 billion people will suffer severe shortages
• Species are becoming extinct one hundred times faster than in any fossil record – we are likely to be heading for the sixth “great extinction”.

If the conculsions seem like yet another extreme environmental report, Mark Henderson, the science editor of The Times, argued that they had emerged from a process that is geared to caution. In other words: be afraid.

It was compiled by a group of more than 380 scientists, all leading figures in fields such as climate science, ecology, fisheries or land use, subdivided into ten expert groups that prepared the chapters. Some 157 of these were appointed by 48 governments – and were thus unlikely to adopt an extreme position.

A further 1,000 scientists took part as peer-reviewers, poring over the conclusions in the areas of their expertise to challenge any misleading claims. A total of more than 13,000 comments on the draft of the full report, and 3,000 comments on the summary for decision-makers, were recorded and considered by the expert groups writing each chapter.

The result of such a process is that conclusions have tended to err on the side of caution. Only claims that have reasonably robust support in published scientific literature have been made, and wilder hypotheses have been rejected. The report’s alarming conclusions appear rather more compelling in this light.

One of the interesting things about such reports is that they now seem to be producing a cultural response. I’ve been reading The World Without Us, a book by a journalist, Alan Weisman, which imagines in careful detail what would happen if the human species disappeared from the earth in short order. It is an elaborate thought experiment which makes such a disappearance seem – bluntly – no bad thing, certainly in the first half of the book.

And George Monbiot – in contrast – has picked up on the mirror image; a novel in which, instead of there being biosphere and no humans, there are humans and no biosphere. ”

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.” McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.”

Such extreme metaphors are signs that people are trying to find the stories which will communicate the danger of the situation in a way which might be understood viscerally rather than intellectually. But – and this is only one example – having heard a UK government minister explain today why the continued expansion of Heathrow is necessary (if we don’t other people will, unless there’s a European-wide agreement) one can’t help but feel that even extreme stories aren’t going to have sufficient impact.

If it was done by design, the Great Designer must be looking on and thinking that testing the model by putting one of the most rapacious primates in charge maybe wasn’t so intelligent after all.

Other posts on biodiversity and resource use include “Gone into ecological debt for the year”, “Visualising consumption“, “Climate change impact on UK biodiversity” and “Britain’s carbon emissions – rising” not falling

I’m not going to try to summarise Berger; this quote represents only an extract:

Watching either, one knew that the world would never again be the same; the risks everywhere, to which life was heir, had been changed on the morning of a new unclouded day.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced that the United States was henceforth the supreme armed power in the world. The attack of 11 September announced that this power was no longer guaranteed invulnerability on its home ground. The two events mark the beginnaning and end of a certain historical period.

Elsewhere in the same collection, in “Let Us Think About Fear”, John Berger quotes a memorable epigram by the actor and writer Peter Ustinov:

“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich”.

A sympathetic review of the book can be found in the New Statesman. A facile one – a travesty of the newspaper’s usual editorial quality – in the Financial Times.

Her take on this is interesting for several reasons:

• the trend of the executive acquiring power from the legislature goes back (in the US and UK) to the economic restructuring which occurred in the 1980s – it’s not a post-2001 phenomenon
• one of the reasons why the legislature loses power is that policies which promote corporate economic globalisation (such as liberalisation and globalisation) strip out oversight functions
• some of the international agencies which have done most to promote this corporate economic agenda (eg the IMF, World Trade Organisation) will speak only to the executive branch of government, not legislatures
• the implementation of deregulation and privatisation policies has shifted the distribution of power inside the state. In the US the treasury, the federal reserve, and the office of the trade representative have all become stronger because of globalisation.

Saskia Sassen writes that:

“The deeper and longer systemic trend at work [i.e. going back to the 1980s] is generating a serious democratic deficit deep inside the liberal state. This is evident in a fact mostly overlooked in the globalisation literature: that the executive branch is far more aligned with global logics than its speech-acts might suggest… This argument turns much of the globalisation debate on its head. It challenges a series of firmly held and fashionable beliefs: markets need small government to thrive, economic globalisation is associated with weakened states, strong (including global) markets feed democracy.”

Gordon Brown’s announcement – on Sassen’s reading – is a deliberate step towards increasing democratic participation – one which she hopes others will follow.

Related post: Globalisation meets  its limits

He cites Russia and Latin America as evidence that “untrammelled market capitalism” is generating a level of fear and uncertainty not seen since 1989 and the end of the Cold Wa:

Resistance is growing as the middle sections of global society begin to realise that they gain no share in the benefits generated by the current period of economic growth – indeed, that their slice of the cake may even be getting smaller. Ordinary middle-class workers – whether they live in Manchester, the American midwest, the deindustrialised Ruhr area of Germany, Latin America or eastern Europe – find themselves left out. The phenomenon is similar wherever you look: the rates of growth of average family incomes are far lower than productivity growth rates, and have been so for years. Economic globalisation is giving rise to new forms of inequality which, increasingly, will have to be tackled transnationally.

And there is a second theme as well; if globalisation brings global injustice, so does climate change:

Like the Titanic, the climate catastrophe knows no democracy. The majority of the victims are trapped in the cheap lower decks, from which there is no escape. Those who are driving climate change are simultaneously attacking the poorest of the poor and threatening their own means of survival. Those who seek to protect their citizens and properties in Britain, the US and Japan from the flooding that will occur when rivers burst their banks and sea levels rise are falling prey to the illusion that the social and political consequences of climate change can be addressed by a solo effort. This is merely another way of dodging the key issue of global justice.

Two thoughts on this: one is that the idea that the ‘globalisation project could fail’ – rather than being inevitable – which has been on the fringe of politics for a while may be moving to the mainstream (pace Tony Blair’s ridiculous assertion last year that ‘globalisation is a fact‘). The argument is that it may fail because in democracies it created more winners than losers.

The second is the idea that if climate change affects us all the rich may eventually be sufficiently concerned about it; as the 19th century Rothschilds were about public health, at least apocryphally, after one of their children died of cholera or some similar public health related disease.

Suddenly, and for the first time in history, every population, culture, ethnic group, religion and region in the world faces a future that threatens one and all. In other words, if we want to survive, we have to include those who have been excluded. The politics of climate change is necessarily inclusive and global – it is cosmopolitics.

Beck suggests that one consequence is that if progressive politics is to survive, it needs to move from a national perspective to an international one. This is because the serious problems we face are international – “from climate change, global economic interdependence and migratory movements through to issues of regional and global peacekeeping”, but that paradoxically, perhaps, most of the issues which have fuelled nationalism in Europe, such as the transfer of jobs to other countries, refugee flows, wars, terrorism, are international issues.

I think there’s a link here with Beyond Terror by Chris Abbott, which I blogged about a couple of months ago, which essentially argued that the only effective security agenda was onewhich addressed issues of global justice. And there are signs that this type of thinking has been understood by the new Brown government: Douglas Alexander, the new Secretary of State for International Development and long-standing Brown ally, took the game to the opposition by making a speech in Washington this week which argued that global problems needed an internationalist solution.

Related post: Globalisation and the power of the executive

The fossil fuel use can be seen in the following chart – China’s fossil-fuel related emissions are the big red smear in the middle. John Ashton, climate change officer at the Foreign Office, is quoted by Ecologist News as saying that China is now building two new power stations a week (it used to be one).

If the point on cement production seems obscure, here’s a quote from the MNP ‘dossier’:

“Cement clinker production is the largest CO₂ source among industrial processes, contributing about 4% of global total CO2 emissions from fuel use and industrial activities. However, for Chinawith its large and increasing share in global cement production of about 44% in 2006, the share of CO₂from cement production in national total CO₂ emissions is almost 9%”.

US emissions fell by 1.4% largely because of economic slowdown (if you really want to reduce CO2 emissions, you need a decent economic downturn). EU emissions (from the EU15) were running at about half of China’s level and showed almost no change. In terms of emissions levels Russia, India and Japan are fourth, fifth, and sixth respectively.

But before naming and shaming starts, it’s also worth observing that Ashton was very clear (in a BBC news story) on why China is the biggest producer of CO2 emissions: “He pointed the finger at rising Western import of cheap Chinese goods, forcing up industrial energy consumption, whilst per capita energy use in the country remained a fraction of that of US or British citizens.”